Comments on: Boston Media Makers Meeting, January 6, 2008

By: David Fisher

David Fisher — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 23:08:37 +0000

The most exciting features of the Apogee Duet weren’t mentioned.
The biggest thing about it honestly is that it’s a high quality, portable and bus-powered firewire interface from Apogee. There are plenty of 2-channel interfaces out there, but Apogee’s sonic quality is generally very high which makes this a stellar deal.
The Maestro software is ported from their development on the Apogee Ensemble, which is the big brother to this interface, which features 8i/o, plus preamps.
The integration with Apple’s Logic is what really makes this exciting, although it works just fine with other products as well. Apogee has had high quality interfaces for years, and they really support them well. The portability and bus-powered nature of this one really makes it a winner (even moreso considering that it has two channels of phantom power for condenser mics).

It was good to see you there!

By: Nate Aune

Nate Aune — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 22:50:05 +0000

Thanks David for the very comprehensive writeup and all your microphone recommendations! I’m going to look into those this week, and maybe we can talk more about them when we get together to look at the Duet.

For those of you who couldn’t attend the meeting but want to hear the audio, I’ve posted it on my blog. http://nateaune.com/2008/01/07/boston-media-makers-podcast/

Or listen to it on Blip.tv: http://blip.tv/file/583168

By: Boston Media Makers podcast | Nate Aune

Boston Media Makers podcast | Nate Aune — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 22:36:47 +0000

[...] and video expert David Tamés who shared some microphone recommendations as well. He posted an excellent summary of the meeting to his blog where he discusses various microphones (incl photos!), so if you’re interested, I [...]

By: david

david — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 18:14:15 +0000

Mike, thanks for sharing what you learned from Adam at the meeting!

By: Mike Ball

Mike Ball — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 17:44:10 +0000

For those with podcasts they want to edit and control the file sizes, I got the fix, In the meeting, Adam pointed me well. I played with both WavePad and Audacity to find good settings.

I had started with BlogTalkRadio MP3 file, at about 14MB per hour. Edited in Audacity or WavePad, 7 to 13 minute segments bloated to 12MB or more each. I want smaller for disk space and for our few dial-up listeners.

Adam suggested playing with settings, making sure the file was mono, and cutting down the bit rate. Combinations ended up working. I have a 12-minute segment that went from13MB to 3MB. For speech, the quality is fine.

In WavePad, the procedure is pretty simple. In File->WavePad Options, choose the radio button for When creating a new file: Prompt for Sample Rate and Channels. Also, for an existing file, File->Save As opens a dialog with Format and Attribute pull-downs.

Audacity make it a bit harder. You have to open or create a file and go to a couple of tabs in the File->Preferences dialog. There are a series of pull-downs in Quality and File Formats that do the trick. I played with several to find my optimum.

Because I have so many old podcasts to edit, I’ll cough up for the paid versions of WavePad and its utilities. There’s lots of conversion capability in the “Master” version and two add-ons.

Thanks, Adam.

By: Ronin Marketeer

Ronin Marketeer — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 02:55:26 +0000

Boston Media Makers and Return of the M Show…

Finally, a relaxing weekend after the holidays are in the rear view mirror. I had a chance to attend the Boston Media Makers meeting this morning, and The M Show finally came out of hiatus to return for the first episode of 2008.
Now begins company kic…

By: Meeting Report: Sunday January 6, 2008 « Boston Media Makers

Meeting Report: Sunday January 6, 2008 « Boston Media Makers — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 02:29:28 +0000

[...] David Tames’ meeting report will be posted at Kino-Eye.com [...]

By: david

david — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 01:44:18 +0000

Brian, you are welcome! It’s nice to know the notes provide a service.

By: ~bc

~bc — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 00:57:59 +0000

David, thanks for the awesome write up. I feel like I was there. One of these Sundays I will make it there. Luckily, my boss Jared did make it, so I'll get more recap tomorrow morning! Sunday mornings are just a tough time for me to function! My geek is usually in sleep mode then!